She felt nothing. She could not let herself go, could not bear to think of the hope they’d once had. It was all too unbearably sad.
‘We should have had a child by now,’ said Richard.
‘But you never wanted children!’ The words burst out of her mouth before the thought had been processed. ‘You always said—!’
‘That was then.’
The silence thickened.
‘Say something.’ His voice was urgent.
Melissa was so angry she could not speak. Tight with rage and disappointment, she could not begin to explain how he was making her feel.
Shakily, she shook her head.
‘It could be just what we need – what do you say, Lissa? A baby? Don’t you want to have a child?’
‘Do you?’ The incredulity was plain to hear in her voice: a voice that did not seem to be coming from her; reedy in the echoing chapel.
‘Yes, I do.’
It was a punch in the heart. If he had wanted children, years ago, before it was too late for her (was it too late for her?) then maybe both their lives would have taken different courses. Stupid supposition. Of course they would. Once, right at the beginning, she had nurtured a fantasy that one day their children might explore the garden and splash in the pool at St Cyrice just as she had done, bringing their friends, making new ones in the village. She had come to terms with knowing it was not likely to happen. She had simply become used to the idea that having children was a closed door, for her; blocked it up and accepted that their life together was enough. Only latterly it hadn’t been, for him.
Now the idea formed that he could go off and have children with a different woman, a younger woman, and the thought of it tied her stomach in knots as surely as if he had punched her there too.
‘How could we have a child now, after all that has happened?’
‘Well maybe not now – but in a while—’
In a while she would be forty.
‘You have no idea what you’re saying, do you?’
‘I thought we were trying again – I thought it might—’
‘Thought? You don’t think!’
He made a noise that let her know his patience was threadbare. But if he was offended, then she was doubly so. She wanted to scream at him.
‘You have no idea what you’re saying, what the reality of a child would mean – providing security, for a start.’
His hands dropped away. He turned and left.
She heard the aggression in his footsteps on the stone, but did not turn round. Heart pounding, she stood alone at the altar.
Was she being unreasonable? Oh God, probably she was. If they were really going to try again, she was going to have to give more ground, engage with him fully again. Run! Run after him! But then she remembered his betrayal and was stuck to the spot.
It was not supposed to happen like this. They were supposed to walk together through the past, and emerge from the church for a glass of champagne, another set of promises – more intimate this time – and order an indulgent lunch. They should have been touching hands, meeting eyes, sharing delicious food and rebuilding. It was not going to happen, and this time it really was her fault.
She could not unbend. She could not forgive, and she certainly could not forget. So much for the wedding vows.
Long, silent minutes after his footsteps had stopped ringing on the flags, she found her way out. Dazzled by the shift in light, she waited in the porch, wondering where he had gone.
He was not in the bar-café on the square which was the obvious place to look. The square itself was empty. On market days it was crammed with people and stalls, a confusion of produce: gleaming purple-black aubergines, wooden pails of olives, tomatoes like scarlet cushions, the cheese lorry, chickens turning on the mobile rotisserie.
She missed her mother, and in another sudden shaft of pain, wondered what it would have been like to have a daughter of her own. Tried – and failed – to imagine what she might have looked like, what her personality might have been, what she would have made of her life.
A bench under the plane trees was empty. Aromas of frying garlic and roasting meat from a nearby doorway were fanned by a breeze that made the leaves rustle high above the little village square.
Around a corner, he was talking urgently into his mobile.
‘Who are you calling?’ she asked, before thinking.
‘Work,’ he snapped.
‘I see.’
‘I might have to go back. Or get myself to a meeting in Paris at any rate.’
She said nothing, felt nothing.
The telephone call came as Melissa was scrubbing the kitchen floor, a penitent scouring at her own failings.
Richard had gone shopping alone where normally they would have enjoyed going together. ‘I will have to go to Paris,’ he’d informed her as he took the car keys. He left without another word.
If she had not been so sure it was Richard, ringing to say he was sorry, she wouldn’t have answered the telephone.
‘Hello?’ she said, sniffing.
‘May I please speak with Elizabeth Norden?’ A smooth male voice, the accent American.
Melissa explained.
‘And you are?’ came his response.
‘Taken aback by your directness,’ she snapped, in no mood for any conversation. ‘Who are you?’
‘This is Dr Braxton, of the University of Michigan. I’m currently in France researching a new biography of the British writer Julian Adie.’
That caught her off-guard. She sank down on to a nearby chair. ‘I see . . . and why would that—?’
‘Are you a friend of Elizabeth Norden?’
‘I’m her daughter.’
‘Ah. May I know your name?’
Sweat trickled down her back. Her arms ached from scrubbing. The room seemed to darken. She told him because she could not see how she could avoid it. She was also thinking rapidly of how odd it was that a stranger should call out of the blue, and yet who might be the one person who could answer her questions – questions she had spent the past few months trying to dismiss as irrelevant now.
It seemed to be proof, if it were needed, that she had been on to something.
‘Well, Melissa, this is a fairly delicate matter – it would be better if I came to see you. Would that be possible?’
‘I’m not sure . . . you’ll have to give me some idea what this is about.’
A sigh at the end of the line. ‘This-s-s really would be better in person, believe me.’
‘But it concerns my mother?’
‘Yes, it does.’
Melissa hesitated.
‘I wrote her last summer,’ he continued. ‘I don’t know whether she got my letter of introduction?’
‘I couldn’t say.’ That made her think, though.
Elizabeth’s eyes glittering. Holding the book of poems, waving it upwards to say ‘Take it, take it. You need this.’ But no words of explanation.
They made an arrangement to meet the following day, in the café in the next large village.
‘I thought we might go down to the coast tomorrow,’ said Richard, when he returned. His cold indifference seemed to have vanished. ‘Are you on for that?’
‘I can’t tomorrow.’
He gave her a look as if to say, well, that’s just typical of the way you are at the moment. He might even have been about to say it, but stopped himself. Instead he carried on into the kitchen with the shopping bags, shoulders hunched. She heard the crump of fruit and vegetables bruising on the table, the opening of the fridge and the hiss of a beer bottle being opened.
She had fully intended to tell him about Dr Braxton. She wanted someone to discuss it with – about how it was possible none of what she had found out about Elizabeth was by chance, how it might even have been Braxton who, indirectly, sent her to Corfu, by writing Elizabeth a letter. It had come too late for her to answer, but it was important enough for her mother to try to tell her. Or maybe, to warn her.
/> In the event, Melissa kept quiet. Perhaps she wanted her own secrets, as he had his. And just as Julian Adie had been her consolation in Corfu and the awful weeks following her return, so now perhaps his new biographer could provide fresh insights and he would be so again.
She wasn’t surprised when Richard made another phone call and told her he would definitely have to get himself to the meeting in Paris. He left that night, with a show of annoyance and apologies. Melissa drove him to the train station at Nîmes and they parted with a dry kiss.
Alone that night Melissa reread Adie’s poems. His voice spoke from the page every bit as persuasively as it had done before, evoking the images that seemed so resonant: the vacated rooms still scented with perfume, the lipstick on the drained glasses, the used twisted sheets; fierce passion distilled into austere lines on the page. She took curious comfort in the intimate alchemy of words, and what lay behind them – the proof that a man could behave badly yet still feel anguish at the hurt he had caused.
And the book itself, the Collected Poems her mother had given her, which she had brought to France hardly knowing why. Smoothing her hands over its shiny dust jacket, feeling the sharp corners of the pages, staring at his inscription and signature, visualising the man himself touching it, she wondered whether any forensic traces of him were embedded beyond the words: an invisible fingerprint, or an infinitesimal droplet of sweat from the side of his hand as he wrote.
Corfu was vivid in her mind again. It was sharp with colour and pain. She could not help but think of Alexandros. She would have liked to talk to him. To tell him what had happened, ask his advice. Could this Braxton be the same man who had been asking unwelcome questions in Kalami?
There was never any doubt she would meet him.
II
THE CAFÉ AT Les Matelles was a typical village establishment, with its high wooden bar, brown walls and posters advertising local events. Melissa felt instinctively that she should keep Dr Braxton, whoever he might be, on neutral ground.
For once she tried not to succumb to imagination, deliberately avoiding the temptation to construct a picture of him in her mind before she saw him. In the event, the reality was stranger than any caricature she could have devised.
The other side of a citron pressé at a table outside, a pip spit away from traffic rumbling through to somewhere more interesting, and where they were the only customers, Dr Braxton was surprisingly attired in the kind of candy striped jacket worn by a juvenile lead flapping a tennis racket in a nineteen thirties comedy. He was portly, in his late forties. His dark hair was retreating over a domed head, but colonising his lower face in a luxuriantly well-maintained beard. Steel-rimmed glasses framed protuberant blue-grey eyes and a large silver signet ring weighted the little finger of his left hand.
He stood up and they shook hands formally.
‘So Melissa, what do you know about Julian Adie?’ he opened after a few basic pleasantries. His manner was every bit as smooth as his voice on the telephone.
‘Not very much, I’m afraid.’
Dr Braxton shifted forward with an intense look. ‘Julian Adie is a gift and a challenge to the biographer,’ he asserted as if beginning a lecture. ‘Any academic study of his work has concluded, no matter how sorrowfully in the case of his fervent supporters – of whom there are many, including myself – that there was an enigma at the heart of the man.’
A sip of bitter lemon shrivelled the inside of her mouth.
‘I have even begun to teach a class exploring the contradictions of his work, and the reversals of previously held viewpoints. To be frank, I am questioning and learning as much as my students.
‘There have been many attempts to capture Adie in print, as it were, some more successful than others. He appears in a legion of books, memoirs and other biographies, a direct consequence of his friendships with other poets and writers, and no doubt, his charm as a man who made such an adventure of living.’
Any observation or pronouncement was made in a tone of complete self-confidence. Perhaps this was meant to be reassuring. Melissa suspected he was using the very words of one of his lectures. She wanted him to get to the point. Yet, clearly this was a man used to dictating the pace at which a discussion progressed, and exactly when a new fact would be revealed.
‘Wasn’t there a serious biography published a while back?’ she asked casually. ‘Surely it all was in there?’
She knew that was not true. She had proved it herself, inadvertently, frustratingly.
Dr Braxton leaned back, sticking his fine stomach out and pushing his glasses back up his nose and paused, assessing her reaction. ‘Is Elizabeth Norden mentioned in th-a-a-a-at book?’ His voice rose and a disconcertingly ovine vibrato broke through to give the pronoun a drilling extenuation.
Melissa stared, as if slapped. What had he found out? Was it much more than she knew?
Beads of sweat pimpled his forehead as he continued. ‘Why isn’t she mentioned? Because he made damn sure she never w-o-uld be mentioned! She could not be associated with him in any way because she knew!’
‘Who are you talking about – Adie? Adie made sure, or the biographer made sure?’
‘Adie, of course!’
‘And . . . because . . . why, exactly?’
She was fighting to prevent any reaction showing on her face.
Dr Braxton reasserted vocal control, but answered her question only with another one. ‘So the nub is, what do yoou know?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Do we both know what I know?’
The effect of this playground tactic in the circumstances, especially in view of his self-confessed eminence in the academic world and her own wariness, had the effect of making her laugh involuntarily.
Braxton pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose again with an index finger and waited intently.
‘I really don’t know what you are asking,’ Melissa replied at last.
Wrists resting on the table, he made a steeple with his hands, then raised the structure to his upper lip. Great thoughts seemed to be accruing inside his domed head. They would have to be phrased to his satisfaction before release.
Seconds passed.
‘I sent her another letter last fall. I don’t suppose she got it.’
‘She might have done.’
‘She never said?’
‘She was ill.’
Dr Braxton closed his eyes and breathed deeply into the steeple.
She watched him for several minutes, determined that she would give no more away.
At last he sighed and spoke:
‘Julian Adie wrote some of the most lyrical, enchanting, life-enhancing celebrations of the human condition. He made personal myths of the places he went, the people he met. But the reality was his life never ran smoothly. Perhaps he wanted too much, too badly. The gifted golden youth of the nineteen thirties gave way year by year to a disillusioned, sour and bad-tempered old man. He had a bad reputation with women, which got worse as he got older. Some said he was violent. He was certainly given to messianic rages, especially when drunk.’
He darted furtive glances right and left, then leaned in to the table.
‘So what happened to him – where did the beauty go, the healthy lust for life? Why did it turn to self-destruction? This had been puzzling me for years. Something happened, but what?’
Melissa sipped her drink, never taking her eyes off his. He gave a couple of toad-like blinks.
‘Then, last year, thanks to the small reputation I have built up as a student and teacher of Adie’s work, I was approached by a woman who claimed she was a friend of his daughter, Hero. She chose the simple expedient of sending an email to me at the university site. Would I be interested, she asked, in some papers which had belonged to Adie’s daughter?
‘Naturally, I was intrigued. I responded immediately, travelling to London to meet her the following weekend.
‘I met . . . my contact in a public house in North Lond
on. She explained that the papers had been given to her by Hero Adie the year before she died. The two women had been good friends. Hero had extracted a promise that the package would be kept private until it was judged that Adie’s reputation was once more in the ascendant.
‘The papers were Hero’s journals and diaries. These pages stated crudely – but backed by a mass of circumstantial evidence – that Julian Adie was a cruel and violent man. In fact . . . he killed a woman.’
He stopped there, wanting to see her reaction.
Melissa tried hard not to give him one. ‘And this is what you have been investigating? I can see it would make an astonishing new take on Adie’s life.’
‘Astonishing? It’s explosive!’ The voice went squeaky again.
‘But . . . Hero Adie – she committed suicide, didn’t she? She was a troubled young woman. She might not have been making a rational judgement.’
‘It might not be true, you mean?’
‘Do you have proof?’ asked Melissa.
‘That’s what I’m working on.’
‘How far have you got?’
But it was a question too many. He was the one trying to get answers. He crossed his arms and blinked.
‘It must be libellous,’ she said. ‘The dead can’t defend themselves.’
‘Neither can they sue for libel, that’s for sure.’
There was a charged pause.
‘I’m not about to write anything that cannot be justified. I am not about to destroy my own academic reputation with some ill-conceived notion.’
‘I really don’t think I know anything that can help you.’
‘You could talk to me about your mother.’
Melissa took a deep breath. ‘But why would I want to do that?’
‘Well . . .’ The tone of his voice was disturbing. Again he pushed the glasses back up to the bridge of his nose with a forefinger.
Her hands were shaking. She hid them quickly under the table. ‘Are you trying to say that she knew about a murder? Because that is just . . . unbelievable. If you knew anything about her, you would realise that.’
‘But I don’t know her,’ he pointed out. There was a hint of a threat in his words. ‘That’s why I would very much like to talk to you about her.’
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